Latin American Revolution: Chile's New Government Wants To Open Up TPP

from the el-pueblo-unido dept

Last year, the US government was adamant that TPP would be finished by the end of 2013. And yet here we are, well into 2014, with no sign that things are anywhere near completion. That slippage is more than just embarrassing: it could have major implications for the treaty. TPP has dragged on for so long there's a new President in Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and she's more doubtful than her predecessor about the value of TPP to her country and its people.

Those doubts are starting to make themselves felt. In a recent speech (original in Spanish), Bachelet said that she wanted Chile to regain its role as a promoter of Latin American integration. That would represent a turning away from TPP, which is based on the Pacific Rim, and only includes two three other countries from Latin America -- Mexico, Colombia and Peru. In an interview with El Mercurio, Bachelet's new Minister for External Relations, Heraldo Muñoz, echoed this policy shift by emphasizing the importance of improving his country's relations with Brazil and Argentina. He also revealed some of Chile's new thinking on TPP (original in Spanish):

"In my meeting with [USTR] Michael Froman, I expressed Chile's position, which is to examine the content of the [TPP] negotiations with care, and to act transparently. We are going to consult with businesses, with civil society, so that these aren't closed negotiations. In addition, I said to Froman that Chile has sensitive areas where we are not prepared to go beyond the FTA [free trade agreement] with the US. There are areas such as intellectual property, the regulation of state-owned companies, or the Central Bank, which are red lines for us."

The theme of transparency was picked up in another interview, this time with the new director of Chile's Department of International Economic Relations, Andrés Rebolledo, which appeared in La Segunda (original in Spanish):

"We received some criticism (for how the [TPP] negotiations were conducted previously) and it appeared to us that there's an important opening for creating greater transparency with the various stakeholders who are involved and who are interested in the negotiations."

Rebolledo aims to do this by creating a new advisory group, which will include not just business interests, but also NGOs and other civil society groups:

We will establish a dialog with them and we are going to hand over elements of the negotiations -- those which are on the table, and of interest.

For us, as the government, it's beneficial from the perspective that we will obtain inputs that will help us better conduct the negotiations.

For TPP, whose negotiations have been some of the most secretive ever, with almost no real transparency, the plans of Chile's new President are not just a breath of fresh air, they are little short of revolutionary.

Re:

I really hope they follow through with it, if one country is able to make the whole document public, then the US and other negotiators insisting on complete secrecy will completely lose any excuse not to make it public, and if the few leaked parts are any indication, the outrage over the rest of it will be enough to kill the thing off for good.

Eh... The TPP will gain enough resistance to be killed off and the US will just try again by copy/pasting the same text into a new FTA with a more beneficial sounding name that is the opposite of its effects. They'll probably try to do it before they even finish burying the last one.

Re: I don't think Colombia is currently a TPP member.

Ya know? I don't really understand why this is happening. It has to be that the TPP managers are well aware that the general citizenry of the world would rise up and smite them if they found out what's really going on. There appears to be too much money, most of it under the table, involved to allow that.

Chile improving relations with Argentina? Not likely, at least not during the current generation. I used to live in Argentina, and they hate Chile there, based on allegations (I have no idea if this is true or not, but "everybody knows" they did it down there) that Chile does/used to steal land from Argentina by establishing towns on Argentina's side of the border and then claiming the area for Chile since it was full of Chilean citizens.

That may be true, or it may be exactly as true as their never-ending cultural obsession with the Falkland islands having been stolen from them by England, (which is to say, a complete and utter fabrication; the islands were never Argentina's in any real sense anyway,) but as long as most people believe it, it'll take a miracle to get any changes.